Thus, in our inquiry into the development of things, we have successively arrived at four points, each of which urged us to make the confession that here something new came into existence, which can not be explained from the preceding conditions of its being; these four points were: the origin of self-consciousness, the origin of sensation and consciousness, the origin of life, and finally the elements of the universe. Arrived at the last problem, we see the confession of our ignorance increased to the still more comprehensive confession that we are really not able _fully_ to explain anything in the world. We are able to perceive a uniformity of law in the states and {148} changes of things, and to abstract therefrom common laws of nature; we can observe single objects, and perceive their states and changes in their connection with one another and in their dependence on those laws. But we are not able to explain scientifically either the origin of these laws or the last physical causes of the qualities of things, which follow these laws. We should reach the same result if we had not started from the objective world of the existing, as we were induced to do by our subject, but from theoretical investigations. Here also we should immediately find ourselves in a world of relations between subject and object, of a regularly arranged abundance of subjective and objective qualities, states and processes, of which the objective only come to our knowledge through the medium of the subjective, and of regularly arranged laws to which both the subjective and the objective are commonly subordinate. But why just these and no other qualities of the subject and of objects exist, why just these and no other laws reign, why just this and no other relation takes place between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, would remain unanswered as before.